


CONSUME (all these bitter waters)

by Mikkeneko



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Blood and Torture, Caleb Widogast Needs a Hug, Caleb is a torture snob, Cultists, Dark, Febuwhump 2019, Gen, Self-Worth Issues, Whump, good ending but not much comfort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-18
Updated: 2019-02-18
Packaged: 2019-10-31 06:16:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,651
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17844014
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mikkeneko/pseuds/Mikkeneko
Summary: The last intact copy of Avantika's journal exists in one place only -- the mind of Caleb Widogast. Those who would follow the Cloaked Serpent will do a lot to get it from him.A lot.





	CONSUME (all these bitter waters)

**Author's Note:**

> **Warnings:** Moderately detailed description of captivity, binding and imprisonment, and torture. A character gets beaten, cut open, loses a few fingers and is badly burned. Later on characters we like a lot less get blown up and decapitated. Be warned. 
> 
> The main inspiration for this fic was really just thinking about Caleb, trained professional interrogator, getting snobby and elitist when a bunch of amateurs try to break him. But of course, even Caleb has a weak spot, and it has green skin and a drinking problem. It was sitting in my to-do fic pile for a while, but when I heard of the "FebuWhump" thing going on I decided it was time. Febuwhump day 6: Torture.

He's worn out three torturers already.

It's the only way he has of keeping track of time in this place. He hasn't seen the sun since he was taken, days… days ago? They keep him in the dark when they are not trying to break him, in a stone cell with the door boarded over, but his captors have daily rhythms that he can learn and he thinks it has been at least five days since they snatched him from the room at the inn.

He wouldn't have chosen dark, he thinks. If you want to disorient a captive, constant light is better than constant dark; keeps them from sleeping, wears down their will.

He's been here five days, he's worn out three torturers and they have not yet broken him. These people, Caleb thinks with the contempt of a true artist, are _amateurs._

They haven't given him any names, though he thinks he can guess who they are. The hooded cloaks that shroud them from head to toe, each embroidered with a stylized staring eye on the front of the hood, are a clue to their identity -- as is what they want from him.

The contents of Avantika's journal, all her research into Uk'otoa, where he is bound and how he might be freed. The Mighty Nein took it from her before she died and sabotaged the pages before they let it out of their hands. The last intact copy of the details on the ritual to raise Uk'otoa are found in one place only: in Caleb's memory. He had to read it to translate it and so he will retain it, perfect and intact, whether he wants to or not.

How these cultists found out about his talent Caleb doesn't know. They have not always been as discreet as they could, not always been as cautious as he would have preferred. Perhaps someone gossiped a little too freely in the inn's common room or in the road about his uncanny memory, perhaps some unfriendly ears caught word and put that together with the story of Avantika's downfall. Or perhaps someone on the ship's crew betrayed them.

The one thing he's certain of is that it was not one of the Nein who betrayed him. That would be impossible, he's sure. He's _sure._

_(but he's been sure before)_

Five days, maybe more, and there has been no sign of his friends, no sign of rescue. It's coming, no doubt. Caleb could not have spent this long traveling together with the others and still, at this late date, fail to recognize that they love him. (He might not understand _why,_   but he knows that they do.) Even if there was no sign of struggle at the inn, they would not believe he just ran off -- Nott will not let them believe that, and they will look for him. Search for him. Rescue him.

_(even if part of him maybe wishes they would not)_

Even if he looks at it from a purely logical, clinical perspective he cannot imagine they would let his captors have their way. They don't want Uk'otoa freed any more than he does, after all. Even if only to save the world from catastrophe, it is surely in their interests to find him, to thwart these bastards, to save him.

_(but it's been five days, and no one has come.)_

He can't think about that now. There's no point. Either they will come or they will not, there's nothing he can do about it either way. He needs to focus on where he is here and now, on breathing in and out, on getting through today.

They've tried three different torturers on him so far. All the cultists look the same under their hooded robes, but he watches their feet and he can see the small differences in footwear that tells them apart. The first man had big feet, bulky boots whose cracks and wear had been clumsily covered up with black paint, and he was a bloody amateur.

He was a thug, nothing more. He hung Caleb from his wrists with his feet barely brushing the floor and beat him bloody with no attention to detail, no _finesse,_   no expertise at all. The thug had not known how to direct his blows for pain and not damage; had not thought to stay away from his head, with all its precious cargo inside, had not known better than to break his insides to bleeding jelly that would kill him long before his will cracked.

 _Careless,_   he'd thought when the metal bar broke two ribs, shards of bone sending spears of agony through his chest. _Clumsy,_   he'd thought when his jaw broke; a prisoner who could not talk could not be made to confess, after all. His left side went numb long before the torturer stopped working on it, and he'd only watched with a detached disinterest as the man grew more and more visibly frustrated, agitated. He screamed his questions inches away into Caleb's face and Caleb just met his eyes, burning with silent contempt as he said nothing. Goaded him on with his steady gaze until the bar came up and cracked across his face. Felt the orbit of his eye shatter, his left eye flood with blood, and the man's strident voice faded to a pleasant ringing hum.

He'd kept his silence until the world boiled up into red blackness. He'd awoken in his cell hours later in the dark, fingers still tingling with the aftermath of a healing spell, and he knew that they'd made a mistake. He'd made them tip their hand too soon; now he knew that the knowledge he held was too valuable for them to let him die.

 _Sloppy._   Crude, and counterproductive to their ultimate goal. Trent would have known better than to heal a dissident on the first day no matter how close to death the session took them -- the magic of the loyal clerics should be conserved until the point where the subject was ready to embrace death as an escape from the pain. Only _then_   should they be brought back from the brink to start again.

Caleb lay in his cell with eyes open to the utter darkness and laughed to himself until the world faded to unconsciousness again.

On the second day they tried again with a new torturer. Three cloaked figures dragged him from his cell to a new room and pushed him down onto a table, straps pinning down his limbs and head. He got a good enough look at his captor's feet to know that this was not the same torturer as before: smaller, more slender, crisscrossed with straps up the calf. A woman, going by the smaller silhouette and by the evidence of the feet.

The second torturer was somewhat more adept than the first, he thought with clinical detachment. At least she seemed to have better control over her blades, cutting around the vital arteries that would drain the blood from his body like a punctured canteen. She was patient, methodical, spending an hour slowly flaying apart the bones on his left hand before even moving on up the elbow. " _Give us the knowledge of the Chosen One,"_ she hissed between cuts. _"Tell us what we want to know, and all this can end."_

Even so, the mistakes in her technique were bright glaring windows to Caleb's studied experience. For all her skill with a scalpel she didn't seem to understand the need to keep her victim's mind engaged, to keep him present and _invested_ in what was being done to his body. It was -- not easy, but doable -- to recall the techniques that Master Ikithon had taught him so many years ago. To send his mind away to another place, sever his consciousness from his body and any awareness of what was being done to it.

He'll give the woman credit for this much precision at least: when they dumped him back in his cell at the end of the session they didn't need to call the healer to keep him from bleeding out.

The third one… the third one actually seemed to have some idea of how real torture worked. Caleb had to give him credit for that. He'd been the first one to try to get into Caleb's mind, subjecting him to dehumanization and degradation and if Caleb had not long ago lost any sense of dignity or pride in himself, if he had not long ago accepted his own subhuman status of worth, it might have bothered him more.

The last day had been brutal, grueling as the torturer escalated further and further in an attempt to break his will. He had had to dig into all the old lessons of his resistance training, all his fraying willpower and in the end all that had carried him through was a burning sense of _spite._   He, Caleb Widogast, trained at the hands of the best interrogators the Empire had ever developed. He has broken far better men than sat in this chair now. It may well be that he deserves all this and more, but he is not going to be beaten by this group of _amateurs._

The man taunted him with threats and insults, described in vicious detail the violations they would visit on his flesh; under it all he remained leaden, unresponsive. When the pain flared he would let himself scream, an animal venting of animal pain, but that didn't connect with his mind and did not touch his will.

"Every man has his breaking point," the man had hissed in his weird, sibilant voice; had this particular group of cultists progressed to partial animal transformations in emulation of their god? Caleb had seen it before. "Every man has his weakness, and I _will_   find yours."

Caleb said nothing.

Towards the end -- in what Caleb could only consider desperation -- the man had bound him to a steel chair, poured oil slowly over the crown of his head, and brought a brand close enough to his face that the light blinded all sight in that eye. _"Your last chance,"_  the man hissed to him. " _Speak, or burn."_

And he'd laughed. He couldn't help it, he laughed because these people had made the same mistake that Beau once had, mistaking his flinch and his trauma for a fear of _fire._   He was still laughing when the brand caught in the oil and the flames raced up and down his body, hair sizzling and curling as the flames bit into his skin. Laughed and screamed at once because they'd made a _mistake,_   they'd brought him a torment that his own mind had already inflicted on him every night in dreams for eleven years in the asylum. He did not fear burning, how could he fear the one fate he had earned?

He'd never quite lost consciousness; he remember hearing urgent shouting, then the light and sound were snuffed and the world around him muffled, trapping him only in his body with the agony on every inch of his skin, and he'd kept laughing until his voice cracked and nothing came out but silence.

A searing touch, a rush of healing brought feeling back to his skin and sight back to the world. They'd returned him to his cell after that and he could tell by the way that they looked at him, the way they shrank from him, that he had won. They had no power over him; even helpless, broken, bound and tormented, he could make them fear him.

He clung to that realization as he lay shivering in the dark on the stone floor. He'd won. He'd _won_ and nothing they could do to him would touch him, reach him.

After that he had been left in his cell in the dark for a long time -- long enough for the food and water to be long used up. He had a suspicion they'd been waiting for this new man to arrive, brought in from some remote site to pick up where the third one left off.

He keeps his head bowed, watching the feet of his captors as they move around him in the cell. This is a new room, one he's not been in before; the wall before him is open but for bars that run from floor to ceiling. The other walls are lined with chests and tables that he can't see from this angle. He's back in the chair, wrists strapped down to the arms of the chair, legs tied securely to the feet. He recognizes the shabby moccasins of the cleric they've brought in to heal him several times now, and the crisscross straps of the woman with the blades. Several more pairs of feet he does not recognize, including one large pair clothed in a set of boots that are new, tailored, and shiny black.

The man stops in front of him and he looks up. A large and powerful body under the typical black cloak: his face is mostly hidden by the draping hood but Caleb can make out the shape of his mouth and chin framed by a neatly trimmed black beard. Skin just slightly mottled by bluish veins that stretch around his mouth as he speaks.

"You have been more trouble to us than you are worth, little wizard," the man says. His voice is deep and dry with just a hint of a rasp that heralds more inhuman things.

He gestures and a breath of mist escapes from under his chin, crystallizes in the air to a blurred shape of frost and shadow. The ghostly hand floats across the distances and touches his face, and an icy cold reaches into his bones as though his skin were not even there and sends pain cascading through his jaw and skull. Necromancy, Caleb blurrily identifies the spell. The man is a caster, but not learned from a book. A warlock, then, like Fjord. Are all of them the same? Do none of them have any proper education among them?

"Do you think we need you alive?" he hisses as the spectral hand squeezes Caleb's chin. "It would be more convenient, but not necessary. We have clerics who can call your soul back from the Astral Plane and hold it in thrall while we force answers from your screaming shade."

Caleb laughs -- more of a hacking cough than true laughter, but it gets his disdain across. "You'd only get one chance," he says, the words stabbing his throat like shards of glass. "Do you think five questions would be enough to learn all Avantika knew?"

The man closes his fist and the spectral hand is banished with a shadow. Caleb grins, frozen and cracked lips splitting along the lines, feels blood trickling down his chin. Another round played between him and his captors, another victory for himself.

"So you can speak after all," the man says, and Caleb feels the first unsteady swoop in his stomach, the feeling of missing a step in a staircase in the dark. _Mistake._  

Moments tick by in silence, which the cultist finally breaks with a chuckle. "You are undeniably stubborn," he says. "If we had more time I would enjoy wearing you down, unraveling you one string at a time."

Caleb suppresses the urge to roll his eyes. If this man thinks he will have any better luck than the three who came before him, he's welcome to try.

"Fortunately I think we have a better way," the man continues, and Caleb stifles a twinge of unease in his stomach. He strides over to the wall of bars and the other cultists leap to do his bidding, to swing the door wide ahead of him. He vanishes for a moment out of sight, his voice echoing in the stone hallways, snapping commands.

From down the stone passage echoes more voices: one a low growl, one a soft-spoken man, the third… the third runs like ice down his spine. A familiar voice, too familiar, a voice that too often had been the only voice he'd heard for days at a time --

_No._

The cultist reappears, a tiny smile curving his lips beneath his hood, and behind him comes another cultist, one Caleb hadn't seen before. The man framed in the doorway is a mountain of a man -- goliath blood, Caleb suspects -- whose robes can't shroud the bulging cords of his muscles. And caught tight in his arms, one hand around her neck while her claws shred uselessly at his stumplike wrist -- is Nott.

_Oh no, no, no…_

The world which had narrowed down to only this cell, hallway and room, only to himself and his captors -- suddenly slams wide again with a force that leaves him nauseous. Knowledge of things outside these stinking rooms, sensation and feeling outside his own skin. He'd cut them all off and now they're back again, exposed as a raw nerve, just waiting for the touch of agony.

"This one came looking for you," the bearded man says, an evil little laugh trailing off at the end of his words. "A friend of yours, perhaps? One of those responsible for the Chosen One's murder?"

"I was just passing by!" Nott blurts out, squirming frantically in her captor's hold. "I was just, um, um, looking for things to steal! That's all! You guys looked like you'd have a lot of stuff to steal, you know? Never seen this guy before in my life!" (She is so, _so_ bad at lying and for a moment he almost hates her --)

"I don't know what you're talking about," he says keeping his expression masklike, giving nothing of his feelings away. It's probably too late -- if they were paying any attention to him they will have seen the way his pulse jumped when Nott was brought in, the way blood drained from his face. They know, he knows they know. But he has to try, to play it out all the same. "What is a goblin to me?"

"What indeed," the cultist says with a chuckle. "Then you will have no objections to anything we do to her. Anything… at all."

Nott stiffens in her captor's arms, eyes round and white-rimmed. Caleb can't allow himself any reaction, no matter how much the sight of her fear digs claws into his chest. He says nothing.

The woman steps forward, offers a knife to the bearded man before moving back against the wall. The man smiles as he holds it out for Caleb to see and he can't take his eyes off it, the serrations and cruel hooks on the blade, he can't avert his eyes fast enough to avoid seeing it.

 _Stop,_ he wants to say, _don't hurt her,_   but the moment he opens his mouth they'll know they have him. They'll know that she is his weakness, that he cares for her more than he ever cared for his own body, and all this time he's spent struggling in silence to hold back the words they want to rip from his mind will be in vain.

For a moment he _hates_   her as fiercely as he loves her, because she can hurt him in ways that these men never could.

Nott shrieks, a rending scream of fear and pain. It's a sound he's heard before, a sound he'll hear again in his nightmares if nothing else. But it's not that sound but the other, barely audible over the screams, that breaks him at last -- the crunching sound of the serrations digging into bone.

 _"Stop!"_   he shouts, and for a moment it all stops.

Nott hangs in her captor's hands, blood dripping down her wrist and off her hand. The sound of her whimpering and his breathing, his blood as it pounds in his ears and hers as it hits the floor, are the only things in the world he can hear.

"Don't hurt her," he whispers, and the words ring in the sudden silence.

"You have seen the benefits of cooperation, then?" the cultist says, and he lets his head hang down as he slumps in his bonds. Defeated, at last, all strength and will broken.

"Yes," he says. "Just -- just leave her alone."

"Caleb, no!" Nott blurts out, but her voice is muffled in the next moment as her captor stuffs some rag in her mouth to silence her. He can just about make out his name in her garbled voice. _"Caleb!"_

"A wise decision," the bearded man says, radiating smug triumph, and Caleb hates him with a dull fire that he hasn't felt before; the helpless, hopeless hatred that comes with defeat. "If I'd known it was that easy, I would have had my men take one of your companions days ago."

Where are the others? Did Nott come alone? Are the others still out there, are they on their way, are they also captured and chained and bleeding? In a way it doesn't matter. Whether the equation is six lives in the balance or just this one, it's a weight he doesn't have the power to resist.

"I'll tell you everything," he says, his voice dry as dust in his throat.

He spends the next hour narrating, his voice running dry and hoarse as the cultists dutifully take down every word. Reciting the entire thing from memory, perfectly, word-for-word. Two cloaked figures work on either side of the room, writing everything down in black-bound tomes as he speaks. They keep Nott in the room with him as a reminder of what will happen if the flow of information dries up. Her arms are chained behind her, the links looping through the bars to hold her in place, and she pleads at him with wide golden eyes he can't bring himself to meet.

"On the next page," he says, swallowing and licking at lacerated lips with a dry and swollen tongue. He shuts his eyes to call it more precisely to memory. "It -- it is not words. It is a diagram of an arch, the warded gateway to the temple that she was collecting information about, the sunken tomb. At six points along the arch there are circles, each one inscribed with a rune -- "

His captor is scowling, black mustache outlining a grim frown. "Are these runes in Common?"

"They are not," he says. "They are not in Sylvan, or Celestial, or any other language I know. She was researching the runes, she thought they might have been Abyssal."

The cultist snaps his fingers, summoning two more cloaked figures out of the shadows. He sends one scampering on an errand, while one of the scribes brings their book over to his chair. "Draw the diagram," his captor orders him. "The gate, the disks, the runes. Show us."

He moves his right hand in aborted gesture, pain shooting up his arm as the splintered bones twist. "If I could," he says, a ghastly smile curling the edges of his lips, "I would."

Another scowl, another snap of the fingers and the skinny cultist with the scuffed moccasins appears. Caleb can't see his face under the hood -- of course -- but by the body he thinks this is a slight young man, barely out of his teens at most, jumpy and nervous at every motion.

The cultist undoes the straps on his right arm -- only the right; his left and both his legs stay bound to the chair -- and sketches a gesture with his hand in the air. Orange light collects around the man's fingers and he grips Caleb's arm, the same searing touch that he'd felt before sending a wave of heat and a rush of feeling through his bones.

He's not as powerful as Jester, Caleb thinks as the man releases his hand and backs away. Not as precise as Caduceus. A truly skilled cleric would be able to direct and control the magic only to where they want it to go, rather than releasing a general wave of regeneration through the body. He can feel the heat washing through his chest, his hips, his legs, sealing tears and mending bones. Even his left hand has mended some, feeling returning to the last two fingers which had been lost to him since the second day.

He flexes his hand, feeling twinges pass through the newly healed muscle and tendon. His captors shove the chair he's bound in towards the side of the room, close enough for him to reach over to the table and put pen to the blank pages that are waiting there.

"Show us," the head cultist commands. From the far side of the room he hears Nott moan. He hunches his shoulders, bows his head and begins to write.

The minutes drag by as he moves the pen with painstaking precision, sweat flowing down his back as he draws. His left hand clenches and unclenches, compulsively rubbing across the blood and dirt stained hem of his shirt cuff. His lips move near-soundlessly, just a breath of air over his tongue. He must get this right, he must get every line exactly correct, or else Nott will suffer for it.

He will suffer too of course, but at least he will have no one else to blame for it but himself.

"There," he says when he completes the last line and lets the pen drop. He pushes the book back towards them and if his hands are shaking, no one will think anything of it. He is a coward, after all. "This was the drawing, the gate, the runes."

"And did the Chosen One not have a translation for the runes?"

He shakes his head. "Not a translation," he says, "but she believed that they spelled out a word. I put the phonetic spellings underneath each rune."

The cultist snatches the book away from him and carries it to the other side of the room, where he bends over the diagram and pores over it with two others. The healer cranes to read it over his shoulder, then looks back at Caleb in confusion.

"These words," he says. " 'I prepared Explosive Runes this morning?' "

The world catches fire.

 

* * *

 

 

Caleb comes to his senses on the other side of the room, ears ringing, shoulder screaming. Other voices screaming nearby too.

He was thrown off his feet, but he knew that would happen. The chair he's bound to _crunches_   under the impact and something in him crunches as well. But he knew that might happen, too. He was counting on the force of the impact breaking the chair so that he could free himself from the straps.

Step one complete. Step two: crawl.

He grits his teeth against the pain and twists his wrist, pulling back on his forearm. The arm of the chair is split into two long jagged shards and he is able to pull his hand free with only a long, bloody gash left by the splinter. He falls forward and catches himself on his right hand, can't support his weight, and his face hits the floor. A brief burst of nothingness boils up in his vision.

Step two might be a little harder than step one.

 _"Caleb!"_   The shrill, panicked voice pierces through the nothingness and he feels familiar hands on him. Too small, too sharp to belong to the cultists. He rolls his head to the side and opens one eye and sees her kneeling over him, tugging at his arm. "Caleb, we have to get out of here!"

 _"Ja,_ " he grunts, and tries again. Gets both hands underneath him this time and is able to lever himself up on shaking hands. His lower half is still tangled in the straps and the ruins of the chair.

Nott is there, sharp claws and clever fingers slicing and tugging at the mess of leather straps and wooden splinters. He feels a sharp pain, then a sudden draft of cold air as one leg of his pants is torn away and then he is free of the weight and he nearly stumbles forward.

With her help he takes a step forward, then another, but he can't quite find his balance; this is the first time he'd been able to stand in days and his legs don't quite remember the trick of it. Something is very wrong in his knee -- not the torturer's fault, he did that to himself he thinks -- but as long as he moves only very carefully in a straight line and does not _twist,_   he can walk.

Standing up and moving on his own power he at last can take in the ruins of the chamber he was held in. Three charred corpses in the corner, nothing but blackened husks from the waist up attached to lifeless human legs. He'd be sick about it if there was anything left in his stomach but a solid block of numbness. Two more bodies lying slumped against the walls, one badly burned but still intact, both bleeding from familiar-looking knife wounds. Nott must have freed herself from her bonds while he was lying uselessly in the corner, he thinks, and finished off the survivors.

"This way," she hisses urgently, leading him out the cell door and into the corridor, and all he can do is limp after her.

She leads the way through the maze of corridors with confidence; she must have scouted out most of the compound searching for him before she was caught. They have to hide twice, once from a disorganized mob of shouting cloaked figures running for the dungeon, then again later from a more serious search party. Nott manages to conceal them both in a niche in the wall with use of an illusion spell; it is good that she can, since he has no more magic left to him.

"I will have to rely on you, _schwester,"_   he says, trying not to wheeze too loudly as his breath rasps and catches on its way in and its way out. "I will not... be of much use like this."

"Don't worry about it Caleb," Nott whispers, loud and harsh in the confined space. "I wasn't expecting you to do any of the fighting, this was a _rescue_   mission, I'm just glad you're alive!"

"Where… are the others?" he asks. He dreads the thought that they may be elsewhere in this hideous place, in their own cells with their own torturers.

Nott doesn't answer at first, chewing on her lip until he raises his head to look at her, filled with alarm. "Are they --"

"They're fine!" she says hastily, realizing the conclusion he has jumped to. "They, um, they aren't here. I came by myself."

He can't breathe. He can barely see, seized in the grip of the sudden realization that the others had not cared enough to come and save him, that the only one who had cared enough to try was Nott. "That was not wise, Nott," he whispers.

"I had to!" She looks near to bursting with anger, frustration, dismay. "Their stupid plan was taking _so long!_ They didn't want to just _rush in_   they had to do this whole stupid infiltration plan, but first they needed to be able to bribe that mangy official to get access to the docks and then they had to convince the supplier that they were real worshippers of Uk'otoa and that Fjord was some kind of Chosen One and it was taking _forever --"_

Caleb lets out his breath. "So you went ahead on your own?" He feels like he can move again, the invisible fist that had seized his lungs releasing its grip. "With no support? Foolish…"

"I had to, Caleb, I had to!" Her small hands clutch at his, her wide golden eyes pleading. "I knew what they were doing to you, I've seen what people like that can do to someone, I _knew_   what was happening to you and I couldn't just _wait!"_

"You didn't have to," he reassures her. "I had a plan, as you saw."

She frowns. "You could have done that at any time?" she says suspiciously.

 _"Ja,"_   he says.

"Then why didn't you do it sooner? Why did you wait so long?" she demands.

"It was too risky," he says frankly. "If the chair had not broken I would not have been able to get away afterwards, and then my only chance would have been gone. But when I saw them hurting you, Nott, I couldn't --" His voice fails him, and he gulps.

Her eyes narrow. "So this plan, it was worth risking everything when _I_   was getting hurt," she says. "But not worth the risk when _you_   were getting tortured? You were just going to sit and wait, and let them hurt you, when you could have gotten away?"

He opens his mouth. Closes it. He doesn't really have a good answer for that, he realizes.

Voices sound near their hiding place and they both freeze, falling silent until the footsteps pass them by. He lets out his breath in a _whoosh_   and prepares to speak again, but Nott's fingers over his lips stop him.

"Caleb, I can't tell you what to do or not do," she says. "I can't tell you what to feel or not feel. But I want you to remember what you felt earlier today, when that _asshole_   started cutting into my arm --"

He flinches. "I do not think I will ever forget it," he mutters.

" _Good,_ " she says. "Because that feeling? That's what the rest of us feel when we see you hurt yourself, or let yourself be hurt, because for some reason you think you deserve it."

He has nothing to say to that.

"Come on, the coast is clear," she whispers, and tugs him to his feet.

His hand on her shoulder, her hand against his back, he lets her lead him into salvation.

 

* * *

 

 

~end.

**Author's Note:**

> The spell Caleb uses here is a modified version of the [3.5 Edition spell Explosive Runes.](http://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/explosiveRunes.htm) In 5th edition the spell changed to Glyph of Warding, giving it more flexibility (it can be used to store any number of spells, not just fire, and can be triggered in a number of ways aside from reading) but also imposing a casting cost of 200g worth of diamond dust, which Caleb could not reasonably have on his person.  
>  _For the purposes of this story,_ the spell is Explosive Runes with the following description, which is about halfway between the 3.5e and 5e implementations:
> 
> Abjuration  
> Level: Wiz 3
> 
> Components: V, S, M (incense)  
> Casting Time: 10 minutes  
> Range: Touch  
> Target: One touched object weighing no more than 10 lb.
> 
> You trace these mystic runes upon a book, map, scroll, or similar object bearing written information. The runes detonate when read aloud, dealing 6d6 fire damage. Anyone next to the runes takes the full damage with no saving throw; any other creature within 10 feet of the runes is entitled to a Reflex save for half damage. The object on which the runes were written also takes full damage (no saving throw).


End file.
